Small Business Strategy Process – Understand business development so you know what your BD department is doing and how to best utilize their skills.
Anyone who works in business development knows that can be difficult to explain. If someone asked you what you do for a living and you said “Business Development” or “Business Dev,” you’d probably be asking.
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So if you don’t have a thorough understanding of what business development is, don’t worry—you’re not alone. The best way to understand biz dev is to break it down into clear parts.
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Read on to explore business development in all its facets, including how to create a business development strategy.
Business development (BD) is a strategy used to find and nurture new prospects to drive business growth.
, business development “creates long-term value for the organization from customers, markets and relationships”. This is a simplistic definition and still faces a hurdle in trying to capture the wide range of responsibilities found in BD. Every effort involved in business development is an activity that helps improve the business. But that definition can be said to describe every action of every employee.
The easiest way to understand BD is to look at it as an umbrella that works to improve all other departments. Although BD is not sales, it helps to improve sales; it’s not marketing, but it improves marketing.
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When it comes to generating sales, the focus is more on researching and identifying potential customers and moving them through the sales process to close the deal.
Business development involves finding new ways to grow and building partnerships that help open doors to new markets and opportunities.
New business development means that an existing company develops a plan to introduce a new product or service according to a new business model in a relatively unknown market. It is aligned with business development while aiming to expand and generate more revenue for the company. It has its title because it can be a radical and dangerous approach.
Unlike normal business development, new business development takes the company outside of its comfort zone and tries tactics that the company has never tried before.
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Example: A sit-down restaurant that exclusively serves diners takes on new business development when it starts offering delivery or partners with a food delivery service like Grubhub.
BDRs work with almost all of your departments as they seek and implement new strategies, goals, prospects, and tactics for your company. Because BDRs work with many people and have different skills, they must come to the table with specific experiences and attributes.
Because of the wide range of responsibilities, it is impossible to single out all the activities that go into business development. That said, here are the main tasks your BD team will likely focus on:
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Strategic Planning Process Steps
Every BD strategy starts with a plan and goals—start building your own business development strategy by following the steps below:
You need a short 30 second introduction for any plan, including the BD plan. Want to go higher? Make several sales proposals and see which one is most effective. You will be able to make proposals while conducting market research at the same time.
An elevator pitch summarizes what your business does, who you serve, and how your business differs from the competition. The goal of your elevator pitch is to open a conversation about how you can serve your customers. When creating your presentation, here are some best practices to follow:
The SMART system is a great tool for achieving business development goals. SMART goals are specific, measurable, attainable, relevant and timely. For example, a good SMART goal for a business development strategy might be:
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“I will look to improve the first time response to customer issues by increasing the number of customer service staff from 10 to 15 people over the next three quarters.”
By following the SMART system, you can keep your goals aligned with the goals of other departments and ensure they can be achieved with your current resources.
SWOT analysis stands for Strengths, Weaknesses, Opportunities and Threats. It is an effective business development tool because it helps you identify areas of growth. The best way to use SWOT is to choose a specific aspect of your business to analyze. When conducting a SWOT analysis, keep these questions in mind:
Example: If you want to launch a new product, you can look at what your company is doing well and poorly, where there may be missed opportunities, and what other companies are doing better.
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Next, define your target audience – this will help you determine who you want to attract as potential new customers. While you want to be specific about who to target, avoid being so specific that you run out of prospects. You can do this as follows:
Conduct research to determine who your competitors are and what your customers want and need. You must know the problems of your customers and how you can solve them.
You can gain valuable insight into your audience’s needs through customer surveys. Eighty percent of companies experiencing year-over-year growth use surveys to collect customer experience data. Here are some tips for creating a survey:
To measure the success of your plan, you need to identify measurable data points where you can document positive (or negative) results. You can do this through key performance indicators (KPIs).
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Depending on what you’re measuring, these KPIs can range from revenue changes to leads and conversion rates. It is important that you choose specific KPIs that complement your plan. Some biz dev KPIs include:
Perhaps the most important aspect of your plan is your budget. Your company must be able to afford your plan before it can be approved and implemented.
Make your proposed budget realistic, but don’t be afraid to push. After all, if your plan works, you should get that money back. Be sure to include these elements in your business budget:
High quality customer service should come first – it could be the difference between a customer choosing you over the competition.
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Maintain excellent customer support with existing clients as well, to ensure you build a long-term relationship with them. Plus, if they consistently have positive experiences with your team, they may refer other contacts to your business.
A business development strategy is incomplete without a sales plan. A sales plan helps outline your sales strategy and includes:
Although it is focused on the sales team, it can provide your business team with useful insights.
Once you have a solid plan, execution ideally becomes just a matter of delegation and supervision. Implementation steps will vary depending on the parameters of your plan, but here are a few things to keep in mind as you get started:
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Business development is about facilitating communication between departments to achieve new business goals. The best way to align your company with a single vision is through CRM.
With a simple CRM like Sell, communication between your business development team and all other departments becomes easy. Plans can shift and adjust in real time in response to everything from marketing clicks to sales tracking. (If you’re new to the world of CRM, we’d be happy to walk you through it with our CRM software explainer.)
Your BD team already has a thousand things to juggle every day, so why make life difficult for them? Request a Sell demo today to keep your business development team – and your business – ahead of the competition. What is a plan without a strategy? As economist and business strategy guru Michael Porter says, “The essence of strategy is choosing what not to do.” In strategic planning, businesses identify their strengths and weaknesses, choose what not to do, and identify what opportunities they should take advantage of. In sales operations, having a clearly defined strategy will help your organization plan for the future, set sustainable goals and achieve them. So how do you get started with strategic planning? You’ll start with strategic planning models and tools. Let’s look at nine of the most popular. Strategic Planning Models Strategic planning is used to set long-term goals and priorities for an organization. A strategic plan is a written document that describes these goals. Do not confuse strategic planning with tactical planning. Strategic planning focuses on long-term goals, while tactical planning focuses on short-term goals. Free Strategic Planning Template No Resources Fill out the form to access your business strategic planning template. Here are some strategic planning models you can use to get you started. 1. Balanced Scorecard The Balanced Scorecard is one of the most well-known strategic planning models, adapted to provide managers with a comprehensive overview of their companies’ operations in the short term. Both financial and operational metrics are considered to provide important context on how the business has performed in the past, how it is currently performing, and how it is likely to perform in the future. The model plays on four issues: time, quality, performance and service, and price. The sum of these components boils down to four specific reference points for setting goals and measuring performance: Customer — how customers perceive your business Internal process — how you
